|
Chinese character encoding is needed for the display of Chinese characters in computers, used in the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages (collectively CJK). The following are common Chinese encoding systems:
Guobiao is usually displayed using simplified characters and Big5 is usually displayed using traditional characters. There is however no mandated connection between the encoding system and the font used to display the characters; font and encoding are always tied together for practical reasons.
The conversion between traditional and simplified Chinese is usually problematic, because the simplification involves mapping many characters with different meaning and usage into a much simpler common writing. The traditional to simplified (many-to-one) conversion is technically simple. The opposite conversion often results in a data loss: in mapping one-to-many when assigning traditional glyphs to the simplified glyphs of the GB encoding, some characters will inevitably be the wrong choices in some of the usages. Thus simplified to traditional conversion often requires usage context or common phrases to resolve conflicts.
One other issue is that many of the encoding systems are missing characters. While the missing characters are often literary and not commonly used in ordinary text, this does become a problem because people's names often contain these characters. An example of the problem is the Taiwanese politician Wang Jian-Hsuan whose second given name is not in some character systems. But the newest GB standard, GB18030 has the complete character repertoire of Unicode 4.0, including the Unihan extensions in the Supplementary Ideographic Plane.
The issue of which encoding to use can also have political implications, as GB is the official standard of the People's Republic of China and Big5 is a de facto standard of Taiwan.
In contrast to the situation with Japanese, there has been relatively little overt opposition to Unicode, which solves many of the issues involved with GB and Big5. Unicode is widely regarded as politically neutral, has good support for both simplified and traditional characters, and can be easily converted to and from the GB and Big5. Despite the lack of explicit resistance, take up of unicode is limited due to technological inertia.
See also
| 
